Symposium: Todd Gitlin 
In the world I was born into, Israel was an emotion wrapped in an idea. Simply by existing, the Jewish state was a portal to deliverance, and since I had been carried through that portal at birth, so to speak, …
Spring 2025
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Symposium: Todd Gitlin
Has the U.S. Left Made a Difference?
The Left has been a complete, if noble, failure: it’s one of the oldest clichés of American history. “Radicalism in the United States has no great triumphs to record,” asserted Christopher Lasch, and “…the sooner we begin to understand why …
From Cairo to Madison
“Democracy is nothing if it is not dangerous,” declared Carl Oglesby in 1965. As president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the largest group on the white New Left, he was rebutting liberals who were displeased that communists could …
Introduction
We asked four writers to answer these two questions: What is your own relationship to the state of Israel? And how do you think that American Jews, as a whole, should relate to Israel? These weren’t, so to speak, the …
Free-Market Think Tanks and the Marketing of Education Policy
“For about two years now, President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have been co-opting much of the GOP playbook on education. They support charter schools. They endorse merit pay. They decry teacher tenure and seniority. On alternating Thursdays, …
Paying the Piper: Is Culture Ever Free?
In 2009, The Hurt Locker prompted a great deal of controversy, and not just because it was about a controversial war. Thousands of consumers who wanted to watch the movie downloaded it freely instead of paying for tickets. The movie’s …
Convenient Scapegoat: Public Workers under Assault
“WE may, at long last, have a way to liberate our nation from the domination of those who should be our public servants but instead are frequently our union masters.” Conservative commentator and pollster Dick Morris wrote those words after …
An Unlikely Pragmatist
Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition by James T. Kloppenberg Princeton University Press, 2010, 296 pp. TOWARD THE end of James Kloppenberg’s Reading Obama, the author ponders an anecdote from the candidate’s speech on race in Philadelphia …
A Nation of (Deported) Immigrants
Sometime in 2012, Valente Valenzuela and his younger brother Manuel will find out whether they will be deported from the United States. Valente, sixty-two, and Manuel, fifty-eight, were born in Mexico, but moved to the United States in 1955, and …
Interpreting Protest in Modern China
When Americans on the Left—and in the Center and on the Right, for that matter—turn their attention to the issue of protest in contemporary China, they most often think back to the traumatic upheavals of 1989, which began with inspiring …
Dead or Alive at Fifty? Reading Jane Jacobs on her Golden Anniversary
I first encountered The Death and Life of Great American Cities in college. A course on U.S. urban history assigned Jane Jacobs’s 1961 bombshell of a book during a discussion of urban renewal, and I was a Jacobsean from that …
Studying the Fault Lines
Age of Fracture by Daniel T. Rodgers, Harvard University Press, 2011, 352 pp. THE VERY notion of “society” originated as part of a highly optimistic scenario: according to Enlightenment belief, human bonds were evolving in the eighteenth century beyond the …
The Mismeasure of Teaching and Learning: How Contemporary School Reform Fails the Test
The good classroom is rich in small moments of intelligence and care. There is the big stuff of course—the week-long science experiment, the dramalogue, the reporting of one’s research—but important as well are the spontaneous question, the inviting gesture, the …
Survivors’ History
The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin by Stephen Cohen PublishingWorks, 2010, 224 pp. WE ALL have a few moments of culture shock when we first get to college, and I had mine the day university president Larry …
Introduction
In his remarks at the Centennial Conference of the National Urban League on July 29, 2010, Barack Obama reminded his audience that “from day one of this administration, we’ve made excellence in American education—excellence for all our students—a top priority.” …
